Chapter Seventeen #2
The doctor followed behind. “Oh,” she called out as my hand tugged the door open.
I paused, facing her. Caine didn’t move a muscle.
“Be sure to schedule an appointment before she reaches nursery age. With the advancement in technology and clinical studies, we now have the means to check for any deficiencies in her senses.”
I couldn’t help it, my gaze lifted to Caine, but he wasn’t looking at me. His jaw was locked tight, his eye was aimed at the door, unfocused.
Unblinking.
I plastered on a polite smile. “Uh, sure. Thank you.”
The car ride back to the mansion was silent. Caine had his elbow on the side panel, his head braced on his three fingers. His pheromones were intense, even Minnie had clocked it. She kept peeking over at him and making an irritated chuffing sound.
“A-fa,” she grumbled eventually, her little hand reaching out from her car seat.
He glanced over at her, and his free arm stretched across me to grab her hand, rubbing his thumb over the inside of her wrist before letting go. She seemed content with it.
“Daddy,” she chirped next, and I ignored the fuzzy feeling in my belly, smiling down at her cute cherub face.
“Yes, baby?”
“Ice-e.”
I huffed a laugh. She was priceless. “Not right now, sweetie,” I said, reaching out to boop the tip of her nose. “When we get back to the house.”
She wasn’t happy with that one. She frowned. “Ice-e!”
I inhaled a breath, swallowing it. “When we—”
“What is she saying?” Caine asked, still not well-versed in her language.
“She wants ice cream,” I translated, shaking my head fondly. “We have loads of those choc ices in the freezer, she can have one later. After her nap.”
Caine’s eye flicked to the front, and he nodded once.
The car changed direction.
“What are you—”
“She had to go through all that nonsense,” he cut in, his tone pitched low and disapproving. “She deserves whatever the hell she wants.”
I said nothing.
Caine didn’t like hospitals either, I’d gathered.
Or having to be patient. He’d been tense the entire hour and a half we were there—pacing, his fingers restless while we waited to be seen, and the same again while we waited for the results.
It was uncharacteristic, the blatant display of unease, even if his expression hadn’t reflected it.
I’d had to zone him out because it made me angsty.
When Minnie had a needle poked in her arm, he’d looked geared up to rip the nurse’s hand straight out of its socket.
I’d already been on edge—this being our first time bringing her out of the house since the incident—and Caine had doubled our guard, seemingly on super-high alert as if he was preparing for an event.
I hadn’t wanted her to sense our distress, so I’d buried my face in her hair and breathed in her scent—steadying my emotions, and drowning him out with my placating omega pheromones.
She had whimpered as they drew blood, but hadn’t cried, and he’d relaxed temporarily, running his fingers through her hair in comfort.
But the whole ordeal must’ve put him in a bad mood—the doctor’s comment at the end, the icing on the cake.
Not that he was the epitome of merriment and sunshine any other time, but he was clearly seething now.
Or was it more to do with the results?
“I suppose this vetoes Minnie’s claim on your title?” I said, forcing a teasing lilt to break the ice. “Since an omega can’t even lead the girl guides.”
His jaw clenched.
Fuck me, he was going to break his teeth at this rate.
“She’s not just an omega,” he snarled, though I didn’t think his wrath was directed at me, or her. I would have punched him already if I did. “She’s my daughter, and she has more claim, more right, than any Alpha. I will make sure that goes undisputed.”
I was stunned by the vehemence in his voice.
It was my impression he’d be like all the other conventional Alphas he grew up around, favouring Alpha children to carry on their legacy and all that medieval crap.
It was the reason his brother hadn’t ascended to leader before Caine, despite being the older twin—the policies, the customs. If a beta couldn’t be a pack leader in Caine’s world, there was no way in hell an omega could.
Unless those practices were rewritten. Or abolished.
“You’re not . . . disappointed?” I asked, hating how unsure I sounded, as if his opinion actually mattered.
It didn’t. He could hate having an omega child all he wanted, but it wouldn’t change anything.
In fact, if it weren’t for how cruelly omegas were treated in high society, I might have felt a little bit of smug satisfaction that he—
“No,” he asserted, interrupting my internal rant. “I won’t pretend her being an Alpha wouldn’t have been preferable, for simplicity, but no. I’m not disappointed.”
My brow creased. “Then why are you upset?”
The question—which was more of a statement, really—seemed to throw him off-kilter. He stared at me, his eye narrowing as if he didn’t understand. “I’m not . . . upset.”
He spat the word like the emotion was alien to him. My answering glare was as dry as a bone. “Caine, you look like you want to murder someone. Your pheromones are fogging up the windows.” I lowered my volume to a contained whisper. “Even Minnie can sense it.”
As if to provide proof of my statement, she peeked back over from her seat again, but burrowed into the side when Caine gazed over at her. It was barely a glint, but he looked mortified, turning away to release a composing breath through his nose. “Forgive me.”
The window cracked open a smidge, and I snorted lightly. “I was being sarcastic.”
The window closed.
The quiet stretched again, and the overpowering scent waned. His shoulders were visibly looser, but not by much. His jaw was still taut.
“You have a fear of needles?” I cast out into the awkward silence, an uncomfortable sensation in my belly compelling me to dig instead of just letting it go.
He snorted. “No.”
“Hey, that’s a really normal phobia to have. I wouldn’t think any less of—”
“I don’t have a fear of needles,” he reiterated, then said nothing for a while. I’d resolved to leave it be, to let him stew in whatever crisis was warring in his head, but he spoke again, his voice devoid of its earlier rage. “It’s unnecessary tests I despise.”
I nodded absently, giving my words the chance to marinate so I didn’t sound so shocked by his honest admission.
“Yeah . . .” I cleared my throat. “I felt that way when I was pregnant with Minnie. There was always another test, more bloodwork. I mean, it wasn’t actually unnecessary, but it felt like it at the time. ”
His gaze snapped to mine. Dark. “You were ill?”
“With Minnie?” He tipped his chin. I shrugged. “A little. I wasn’t eating properly, so they had to monitor me for a bit, make sure she was getting enough good stuff to grow.”
There was a pause. “Why weren’t you eating?”
My cheeks heated in shame, and I glanced down at my hands in my lap, nails already grazing my cuticles.
“I . . . I couldn’t really afford it sometimes, so I ate when I could.
” I forced my eyes up again. He was watching me intently.
“Don’t know if you know this, but uh, unmated omegas are given an allowance when they’re pregnant, for expenses and shit, but in our district it was barely enough to live off.
No one hires pregnant omegas or omegas with children, so I had to make the money stretch every month. ”
A furious gleam flickered in his pupil, but it vanished before I could really heed it. “No, I wasn’t aware. Didn’t you receive an inheritance?”
“Uh . . . I had the house,” I uttered distractedly, wondering when I’d told him about my parents’ deaths.
It would have been another one of my flyaway comments to the staff, probably.
“There was an insurance payout, but without it, my grandma couldn’t have looked after me for all those years. It ran out, eventually.”
Caine’s expression grew pensive, and before he could part his lips to say anything else, I waved a hand in the air. The conversation was getting a little too heavy for my liking.
“It’s all irrelevant now. I survived, and Minnie turned out just fine, didn’t you, baby?” I tickled her belly, making her giggle. “That’s what matters.”
A short huff came from beside me, and his next words had to be aimed at the window as I strained to hear. “We won’t know that until the next test.”
My shoulders stiffened.
There was a bitterness in his tone that made my hackles rise. I glanced over at him again, studying the expression shadowing his face—one I hadn’t seen before. It almost looked like guilt. Or was it . . . shame?
“She’s perfect,” I gritted out adamantly, not even convinced my defensiveness was against him, but it had to be voiced. “Whether they find something or not, that won’t change. We’re not going to treat her any differently, and I swear, I’ll slaughter anyone who does.”
Caine didn’t look at me, but his face turned slightly in my direction and he dipped his head in acknowledgement. “On that, we are in agreement.”
The car ride to the ice cream shop was silent, except for Minnie garbling and clapping to the kids tunes George switched on for her.
The scent in the air was calmer.
Minnie was sound asleep, exhausted from a hard day of being examined and prodded.
Her afternoon nap had been abandoned in favour of ice cream and a walk in the park.
I’d expected her to conk out in the car back to the mansion, but she’d been wired to the moon, babbling away to herself and showing way too much energy for a kid who hadn’t missed a nap since the day she was born.